Michael Pollan points out that, as opposed to the "French Paradox", the "American Paradox" is that while Americans are obsessed with health food and nutrition, they have some of the poorest diets in the world.
It is my belief that, along with physical education, nutrition/health education needs to take a higher precedent in our schools, both primary and secondary. Until the government stops controlling the public image of what is healthy, millions of Americans a year will continue to die of malnutrition (whether from diabetes, heart disease, obesity, cancer, the list goes on...)
For example, I'm sure that many of us remember this food pyramid when we were growing up. Harvard has recently published their own version of the healthy food pyramid, but American schools have not yet accepted this into their curricula.
"A Fatally Flawed Food Guide" by Luise Light is a somewhat outdated, yet still highly relevant article that outlines how the modern food pyramid was sold to the highest bidder and then marketed as the ideal model for good nutrition. Some highlights:
When our version of the Food Guide came back to us revised, we were shocked to find that it was vastly different from the one we had developed. As I later discovered, the wholesale changes made to the guide by the Office of the Secretary of Agriculture were calculated to win the acceptance of the food industry. For instance, the Ag Secretary’s office altered wording to emphasize processed foods over fresh and whole foods, to downplay lean meats and low-fat dairy choices because the meat and milk lobbies believed it’d hurt sales of full-fat products; it also hugely increased the servings of wheat and other grains to make the wheat growers happy. The meat lobby got the final word on the color of the saturated fat/cholesterol guideline which was changed from red to purple because meat producers worried that using red to signify “bad” fat would be linked to red meat in consumers’ minds.
Where we, the USDA nutritionists, called for a base of 5-9 servings of fresh fruits and vegetables a day, it was replaced with a paltry 2-3 servings (changed to 5-7 servings a couple of years later because an anti-cancer campaign by another government agency, the National Cancer Institute, forced the USDA to adopt the higher standard). Our recommendation of 3-4 daily servings of whole-grain breads and cereals was changed to a whopping 6-11 servings forming the base of the Food Pyramid as a concession to the processed wheat and corn industries. Moreover, my nutritionist group had placed baked goods made with white flour — including crackers, sweets and other low-nutrient foods laden with sugars and fats — at the peak of the pyramid, recommending that they be eaten sparingly. To our alarm, in the “revised” Food Guide, they were now made part of the Pyramid’s base. And, in yet one more assault on dietary logic, changes were made to the wording of the dietary guidelines from “eat less” to “avoid too much,” giving a nod to the processed-food industry interests by not limiting highly profitable “fun foods” (junk foods by any other name) that might affect the bottom line of food companies.
But even this neutralized wording of the revised Guidelines created a firestorm of angry responses from the food industry and their Congressional allies who believed that the “farmers’ department” (USDA) should not be telling the public to eat less of anything, including saturated fat and cholesterol, meat, eggs and sugar.
Americans are never going to be healthy unless we start changing our perception of nutrition and our education at the most basic level. I think Michael Pollack sums it up best in this article, when he says "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
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